I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.

That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

It's the idea of baggage. When you hear about people in their 40s boast about not having baggage. I think having no baggage is your baggage. That means that you haven't thrown yourself into the mess of life.

I am influenced by books which dont have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated.